Earls Barton has one of the best surviving Anglo-Saxon towers in England. It's dated to around AD970.
For me its appeal is in the patterned long and short work that makes it look like a gingerbread tower. They have built a thing of compression, but structure it out with slim plinths of stone, as if it were held together by tension (like a timber framed house).
The Saxons didn't have a stone building culture - indeed timber derives from an old Saxon word meaning 'building.' A number of surviving Saxon texts and poems talk of extant stone buildings as if they have been built by giants (in reality the Romans).
Member discussion